The Queue: Anthem could have been amazing

Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you Anthem is a hidden gem you’re missing out on. There’s a laundry list of valid complaints about Bioware’s failed foray into looter shooter territory, and I’m not here to belabor them. But I will say this much — the initial gameplay loop of flying around in a futuristic mech suit is freaking amazing.

Last night I fired up the game and gave it a couple hours of playthrough, and I have to say, up until I got to the hub city — a forgettable location whose name has already escaped me — I was having a blast flying around doing a mission.

Whatever else can be said about Anthem — the lore is presented in a way that makes it slide right off of your brain, the voice acting is uneven, and the Frostbite engine seems to be a bear for developers trying to animate faces on it, to the point where the character creator in Anthem is “pick a face and be done with it, damn your eyes, no, seriously, we’re not even gonna try and let you choose your own eyes” — I am still in awe of the whole experience of piloting a Javeline exo-suit and engaging in combat in the lushly rendered jungles of the game.

Sure, in the end it’s ultimately not a good game. But the kernels of a good game are there — exquisite and lovingly rendered visual details, a core gameplay loop of jumping around, flying, and fast paced combat with a multitude of different enemies — and it could have become something great, had EA and Bioware not rushed it out the door too soon. Maybe if it hadn’t been trying so hard to be Destiny 2.5 it could have carved out an identity of its own, it’s certainly a lot more fun to play than its inspiration.

Velociraptor mongoliensis is not directly ancestral to modern birds. It would be more apt to call them cousins. The line that leads to modern birds diverged from other theropods in the Coelosauria in the mid-Jurassic while Velociraptor lived in the late Cretaceous, between 75 to 71 million years ago. Indeed, while the entire line of Dromaeosauidae were extremely similar to birds, they were not direct line descendants or ancestors to them.

Currently birds are placed within the Maniraptora along with the Dromaeosaurs and Troodontids, in a group called the Eumaniraptora. So your cannibalistic chickens, while not descended from any of those animals, are more closely related to them than they are to a Therizinosaurus or an Alvarezsaurid, and more closely related to those than a T-rex, and more closely related to a T-rex than a crocodile or a Sauropod.

The cannibalism is however due to human inbreeding and poor husbandry. Trust me, I grew up raising chickens, the reason they’re horrible little monsters is because we raise them in cramped, awful conditions and I have personally witnessed farmers grinding up unfertilized eggs and even chicken corpses and putting it back into their feed. Basically, you put any animal into an extremely small enclosure compared to their ancestral condition and you feed it ground up babies, yeah, they go a bit crazy.

I cut the part about you farming for the Acherus models from Legion because, well, you’ve got that in hand. Instead, here are some suggestions for good 2h sword models for Worgen ladies.

Bleakblade of Shahram has a classic look — same model as the original Blackblade, which no longer drops — and can be farmed for in the Warlords version of UBRS. It’s a shorter 2h which keeps it from clipping as much as other options. And if you’d rather get a red version, the Massacre Sword is a green world drop from old Vanilla times, you can farm for it in various places and it looks like it’s caked in drying blood.

Also, again if you’re looking for a more compact blade for your DK, Bonereaver’s Edge is another option I feel gets overlooked. That big skull on the hilt goes well with most DK transmogs and in general it’ll avoid clipping and has a distinctive patterned blade. Just farm Molten Core on any class that can equip a 2h sword (so DK, Paladin, Warrior, Hunter, and Monk? I think that’s the lot) and go kill Rag a bunch.

And just like that I now want to get the Valdrakken Treasure bag again.

Seriously, though, I’ve seen on the forums that the gold has been moved to the weekly in Zaralek Caverns, but I can’t confirm that yet.

For people who don’t know, I speak Edmontonese and can translate for Cory here. He’s saying he wants the Edmonton Oilers (a hockey team) to defeat the Vegas Golden Knights (also a hockey team, and not a franchise of Medieval Times as you might have expected) in the game they were playing.

They did indeed defeat them 4 to 1 and are now tied 2 and 2 in a series that will now be determined in the next few games — if each team wins one more game, we’ll get a game 7 to decide it all, but if either team wins both games we’ll see a victor emerge in game 6.

Sadly, no one will be wearing golden armor, riding a horse, or shooting oil on anyone in any of these games.

I have no idea. It went on hiatus back in patch 8.0 and I have not heard or seen anything about it returning since.

I feel like maybe they forgot about it? Maybe there’s a poor dev stuck in an office somewhere toiling away on this all by themself, trying desperately to get the Brawler’s Guild back, while everyone else on the team was reassigned to Diablo 4 or something.

More seriously, it does feel weird that we haven’t heard anything about it in a while. Maybe today.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Take care and have a good time until I see you again.